Rethinking Cuba's political system as a model of participatory democracy
S. E. Anderson
Cuba Beyond the One-Party Myth
Rethinking Cuba's political system as a model of participatory democracy
Cuba serves the function of a classificatory device in liberal discourse. It is not analyzed so much as assigned a category. A one-party state is deemed, in advance of investigation, incompatible with democracy. The conclusion is treated as self-evident, though the historical and material assumptions underwriting it are rarely made explicit.1
The United States never exhibited a sustained concern for Cuban democracy prior to 1959. On the contrary, it maintained close relations with the regime of Fulgencio Batista, a government defined by repression of organized labor, political opposition, and independent civil society.2 During this period, democratic norms were not a central axis of U.S. foreign policy. They became salient only after the Cuban Revolution began to restructure property relations and assert economic sovereignty.3
The asymmetry of, first, propping up a dictator, offering him support as he ordered his own civilians to be beaten, butchered, imprisoned, or exiled, and profiting from the same civilians’ break-back labor; then crying out for the Cuban people painting them as oppressed and invoking democracy is not registered as a contradiction. It is made normal through a usage of the term that is, in practice, conditional; utilized where states diverge from the capitalist mode of organization, and suspended where political alignment with U.S. interests remains intact regardless of internal political form.4
Cuba, under nearly 70 years of U.S. blockade, has shown incredible resilience, both literally—having not experienced a day since 1959 of normal trade relations—,and ideologically by creating a political system ungoverned by dark-money financiers and lobbyists from groups controlling billions, some trillions, in assets. Democracy is alive in Cuba, but not in the liberal form. Cuba and democracy are not antithetical; one is not antagonistic to the other. I think they’ve proven, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union, but especially now as the blockade is aggravated and their fuel is running out, that the political system they’ve designed is healthy and built to last under constant external pressure. We’d be mistaking the forest for the trees if we didn’t acknowledge that nobody has any idea what form the politics of Cuba would look like if the blockade ended. I’m not going to guess, not now at least, but I am going to examine how the current system functions and formulate why it’s built to last.5
Cuba prior to the revolution is often treated as a baseline, a society that, while imperfect, possessed the appearance of a liberal democracy. But looks can be deceiving. Paper-rights are undoubtedly nice (and necessary), but they mean nothing if not followed through in action. The paper burns as the blood flows, here this second, gone the next. How rights are protected and enforced is what actually matters. True democracy is inherently materialist—the people making decisions that positively affect their everyday reality: legislation that improves local biodiversity through community efforts, that caps rent at 15% of one’s monthly income, that earmarks funding for buildings in regions with the most need, etc.
After the Spanish-American War, Cuba entered the twentieth century under conditions of formal independence but deep structural dependency. Its economy was tightly integrated into U.S. capital, particularly through sugar production, land ownership, and infrastructure.6 Political sovereignty existed, but within limits imposed from abroad. The figureheads changed, the policy, especially toward Western—mostly American—corporations interested in breaking ground on a new frontier, ripe for exploitation, never changed. The owners of capital took no hesitation in carving out a new market off the backs of Cuban peasants and the rich island soil.
Under these conditions, elections did not translate into substantive political control. What existed was a fragile system designed to appear as if people had agency, while a select few—literally those handpicked by the U.S. and Batista—profited from their oppressive collaboration, and the majority lived with the constant fear of being imprisoned, tortured, or even kicked out of the country. A democracy in name only, the nation functioned internally as an oligarchy and externally as a satellite state.7
This becomes more visible under Batista. His regime is a great example of how standard democratic practices can exist under an oppressive authoritarian. Political participation was narrowed, opposition suppressed, and labor organization restricted, while the state remained internationally acceptable so long as it preserved the underlying structure of property relations.8 The absence of democracy, in this sense, was not decisive where class power remained stable.
The Cuban Revolution disrupts this exploitative relationship, though not in the linear manner retrospective accounts often imply. It does not begin as the execution of a fully articulated ideological program. It emerges from a conjuncture of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and demands for sovereignty shaped by the legacy of José Martí. It is, at the beginning, a radical nationalist struggle set on major land nationalization and redistribution. The revolutionaries aimed for the overthrow of the Batista regime, expropriation of property from foreign businesses and large landholders, and the expulsion of foreign capitalists from the island. A clearly defined ideology—Marxism-Leninism combined with a guerilla war strategy called foquismo—only emerges from the struggle.
The influence of people like Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin becomes more explicit as the revolutionary process confronts the practical demands of governance, economic restructuring, and sustained external hostility. It is through conditions forced on them from outside that Fidel and Che necessarily were wary of the West, which would gradually shape the movement into the disciplined and formidable resistance it became over the years of fighting.9
Cuba exemplifies how ideology is a practical formation forged in struggle. In other words, it is through engagement in combat, recruitment and governance efforts across villages in the south, and a public image war against the reactionary government that a clear program could begin to be made out. This highlights how political consciousness is not antecedent to material struggle; it is reorganized by it.
Following the revolution, the United States adopts a position of sustained hostility toward the new Cuban state by immediately enforcing an embargo of Cuban goods. There is a clear material basis for this decision by the American government: the nationalization of U.S.-owned assets, the restructuring of property relations, and the refusal to maintain a subordinate position within the hemispheric economic order.10
Cuba, under Fidel, took a stance of non-cooperation with American businesses, but never with American citizens. Contrary to popular belief, it is actually the embargo by the United States which bans Americans from economic cooperation with Cuba.11 Within this context, the use of democratic language is deceiving as it conveniently ignores the historical and material nuances that are necessary for actually understanding the Cuban political system. Its invocation intensifies not in relation to political form as such, but in relation to economic transformation—which has been completely stifled by the U.S. embargo, reportedly, according to the UN, costing the Cuban economy $4.87 billion between 2022 and 2023 alone12 .
As Ellen Meiksins Wood argues, modern democracy is historically entangled with the development of capitalism. What appears as a universal political norm is, in fact, a historically specific form whose stability depends upon particular property relations.13 This form of government, liberal democracy, is historically rooted in social contract theory, which, I argue, is built upon the active fear mongering of a so-called “state of nature” that doesn’t exist.
If we accept this kind of democracy as paramount, then Cuban political organization is often minimized to a single descriptor: one-party rule. While not incorrect, it assumes the implication that a democracy is only as healthy as the number of political parties it has. Instead of parties, where participation is incredibly exclusive—for example, my home state of Michigan does not allow people to publicly vote for candidates for attorney general, secretary of state, university regents, or the supreme court, they are chosen by Republican and Democratic delegates at the party conventions; Cuba encourages collective participation between members of communities looking to affect change.
At the local level, i.e., at its most material, the Cuban system includes neighborhood-based institutions of participation, including Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDRs) and related structures of community organization. These function as sites of local deliberation and coordination, integrating residents into forms of governance that extend beyond periodic electoral cycles. CDRs and other participatory institutions allow the Cuban people to, in effect, govern their day-to-day lives to a much greater extent than we can in the West.14
Electoral processes operate primarily at the municipal level, where candidates are nominated through local assemblies rather than through party primaries or privately financed campaigns. The system does not eliminate hierarchy or disagreement, but it structurally limits the role of capital-intensive electoral competition in shaping political outcomes.
At the national level, the National Assembly of People’s Power aggregates representatives from lower levels of governance, forming a system designed to channel participation upward from local structures rather than downward from competitive party systems. There are no parties to compete for people’s loyalty, like sports teams; instead, there are people who have to compete with other people on the basis of policy, which is how a democracy is supposed to function.15
Empirical studies of Cuba’s system of Popular Power indicate that, while participation is uneven and constrained in practice, the institutional architecture is explicitly oriented toward integrating citizens into ongoing processes of governance rather than limiting participation to electoral intervals alone.16
Is Cuba’s system without its challenges? Of course not, but this is an island of 10 million people under total economic siege, forced into isolation. Over 80% of Cubans have never lived a day of their lives without knowing the American embargo that steals billions from their economy each year. That they even have a functioning government is incredibly admirable.17
Central to the critique of this system is the role of the Communist Party of Cuba, frequently interpreted as evidence of democratic deficit. The underlying assumption is that meaningful political choice requires structured competition between parties for electoral power. This is a false choice. We should have no interest in parties and every interest in policy, for parties are rhetorical while policy is material.
This assumption depends on a specific model of political organization in which parties function as competitive actors within a political market. In liberal systems, this model is historically grounded: parties aggregate interests, mobilize voters, and compete through mechanisms shaped by unequal access to financial and media resources.
In Cuba, by contrast, the party functions less as an electoral competitor than as a coordinating institution embedded within the state-society relationship. It provides ideological coherence, policy orientation, and organizational integration across institutional levels.
This is not merely a semantic difference. It reflects different conceptions of political mediation. As C. B. Macpherson argues, liberal democracy increasingly reflects market logics in which political participation is structured through competitive aggregation rather than substantive collective control.18
The evaluation of these systems ultimately turns on the relationship between formal rights and material capacity.
Liberal democracy defines participation primarily in procedural terms: voting rights, freedom of association, and competitive elections. These are significant historical achievements. However, they operate within material conditions that are unevenly distributed and largely external to formal political equality.
Time is a prerequisite for participation, yet is unequally distributed under wage labor. Economic resources shape access to political influence through campaign financing, lobbying capacity, and media control. Educational inequality differentiates access to political knowledge and institutional navigation.
These are not external distortions of democracy, but constitutive conditions of its operation.
As Amartya Sen states, political freedom is inseparable from the substantive capabilities required to exercise it.19 Formal equality, absent material capacity, does not produce equal political agency across society.
Cuba’s system attempts, within significant constraints—most of them external to the system itself—to address these conditions through universal education, public healthcare provision, and institutionalized local participation.
One of the clearest indicators of this difference lies in social outcomes that shape the capacity for participation itself. Cuba maintains near-universal literacy, with adult literacy rates consistently above 99 percent, alongside a publicly organized education system extending through higher education without direct tuition costs.20
Healthcare provision is similarly structured around universal access, with primary care embedded at the community level, especially in rural areas. Life expectancy remains directly comparable to that of many higher-income countries, including the United States, despite prolonged economic sanctions and resource constraints21, yet another fact that leaves you in awe. These outcomes do not establish democratic legitimacy in themselves, but they do indicate that key material preconditions for participation are socially organized rather than market-determined. The question is not only how political decision-making is structured, but what social conditions determine who is able to participate in it at all.
By contrast, in the United States, access to healthcare and educational attainment remain strongly stratified by income, employment status, and geography, producing formally universal rights whose effective realization is unevenly distributed across class lines. Especially disgusting considering Cuba, under active embargo in the 1960s, made a commitment to itself and the world that every citizen would be educated and able to receive healthcare as a basic human right.
None of this resolves the internal tensions of the Cuban system. They remain significant.
Political dissent is constrained, and institutional decision-making can become centralized. The boundary between coordination and control is not always stable, and at times is crossed in ways that restrict political pluralism. The point is that, for all its flaws, the Cuban system is a human system. Cuban communists don’t have access to secret generators that the general public don’t; when the power goes out, every citizen experiences it. A system forged by struggle can overcome the most trying of times, as Cuba shows.
The system naturally takes the appearance of the population it governs, its strengths and weaknesses, its challenges and opportunities.
These limitations cannot be understood apart from the geopolitical and economic conditions in which the system developed: a small island subjected to sustained external pressure and economic isolation, compelled to construct political institutions under conditions not of neutrality but of persistent constraint.
To acknowledge this is not to resolve the contradictions of the system, but to specify their conditions of emergence.
The standard conclusion is that Cuba fails to meet the criteria of democracy. This judgment is valid only within a narrowly procedural definition of democracy understood as multi-party electoral competition within a market-based political economy. Treated as universal, however, this definition obscures its own historical specificity.
Across liberal political systems, formal political rights coexist with sharply uneven material capacities to exercise them. Time, income, education, and access to information are unequally distributed, shaping the effective scope of political participation. Under such conditions, formal equality does not necessarily translate into substantive political agency.
Cuba does not resolve these contradictions. It reorganizes them. Its political institutions attempt, within severe constraints, to expand participation through universal education, public provision of healthcare, and structured forms of local governance. These measures do not eliminate inequality or political tension, but they alter the material conditions under which participation occurs.
The issue, therefore, is not whether Cuba conforms to liberal democratic norms. It does not. The more fundamental question is whether those norms adequately capture the relationship between formal political rights and the material conditions required for their exercise.
Democracy, understood in strictly procedural terms, identifies a set of institutions. Understood materially, it refers to the social conditions that determine the effective capacity to participate in collective decision-making. The Cuban case forces this distinction into view. It does not resolve it.
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Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Louis A. Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
James Petras, “Cuba and the New U.S. Imperial Offensive,” Monthly Review 59, no. 3 (2007): 1–16.
Ibid.
Ellen Meiksins Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism.
Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me (1953; Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2007).
Pérez Jr., Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution.
Petras, “Cuba and the New U.S. Imperial Offensive.”
United Nations. 2023. “Economic, Commercial Embargo Imposed by United States against Cuba Harmful, Violates UN Charter, Speakers Underline in General Assembly | UN Press.” Press.un.org. November 1, 2023. https://press.un.org/en/2023/ga12552.doc.htm.
Wood, Democracy Against Capitalism.
Haroldo Dilla Alfonso, “Cuba’s System of Popular Power,” Latin American Perspectives 36, no. 2 (2009).
Ibid.
Peter Roman, People’s Power: Cuba’s Experience with Representative Government (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).
United Nations. 2023. “Economic, Commercial Embargo Imposed by United States against Cuba Harmful, Violates UN Charter, Speakers Underline in General Assembly | UN Press.” Press.un.org. November 1, 2023. https://press.un.org/en/2023/ga12552.doc.htm.
C. B. Macpherson, The Life and Times of Liberal Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books, 1999).
Gasperini, Lavinia. 2000. “The Cuban Education System: Lessons and Dilemmas.” World Bank. Country Studies Education Reform and Management Publication Series. https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/549011468746733557/pdf/multi0page.pdf.
Keck, William. 2021. “Health Equity, Cuban Style.” AMA Journal of Ethics 23 (3): E258-264. https://doi.org/10.1001/amajethics.2021.258.
s. e. anderson
author of The Black Holocaust for Beginners
"If WORK was good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." (Haiti)
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